By 1958, the CIA is providing over half the operating budget of the European Movement — the umbrella organization coordinating the drive toward European political and economic integration — through the American Committee on United Europe (ACUE). Declassified documents published by Georgetown University professor Richard Aldrich reveal that ACUE, founded in 1948 by OSS veterans William J. Donovan (wartime OSS director) and Allen Dulles (future CIA director), serves as the primary conduit for American intelligence funding of European federalist organizations throughout the 1950s.
The scale is remarkable. ACUE's founding board reads like a roster of the American intelligence establishment: Donovan as chairman, Dulles as vice chairman, with board members including Walter Bedell Smith (future CIA director), Tom Braden (head of the CIA's International Organizations Division), and corporate leaders with intelligence connections. From 1949 to 1960, ACUE channels millions of dollars — the exact total remains classified — to the European Movement, the European Youth Campaign, and related organizations promoting European unification. By 1958, ACUE funding constitutes 53.5% of the European Movement's budget, making the CIA effectively the majority funder of the campaign for European integration.
The funding targets specific outcomes. ACUE money supports the movement for a European Parliament, the European Defence Community proposal, and the drive toward what eventually becomes the European Economic Community (established by the Treaty of Rome in 1957). American intelligence sees European unification as serving multiple strategic objectives: creating a unified economic bloc strong enough to resist Soviet pressure, eliminating the Franco-German rivalry that produced two world wars, and binding Western Europe to the American-led security architecture.
The European leaders who receive ACUE funding include some of the most prominent figures in postwar European politics. Robert Schuman (French foreign minister and architect of the European Coal and Steel Community), Paul-Henri Spaak (Belgian prime minister), Joseph Retinger (secretary general of the European Movement), and others accept American financial support while pursuing their own sincere visions of European unity. The relationship is not one of puppet and master — these are independent political figures who share the strategic vision and welcome the funding that makes their work possible.
This is what makes the ACUE operation a paradigmatic case of institutional capture rather than simple bribery. The CIA does not create the European federalist movement — the movement exists independently, driven by Europeans who witnessed the devastation of two world wars. What the CIA does is ensure that the movement's most pro-American, most anti-communist faction has the resources to dominate the debate. Alternative visions of European integration — socialist, neutralist, or Gaullist models that might have produced a more independent Europe — are starved of funding while the American-aligned model receives majority financial support.
When the funding relationship is finally exposed through declassified documents in the 1990s and 2000s, the revelation provides ammunition for Eurosceptics who argue that the European project was never truly European — that it was, from its inception, an American intelligence operation. This is an oversimplification: European integration has deep European roots. But the ACUE story demonstrates how covert intelligence funding can shape the trajectory of political movements without creating them from scratch — by tilting the playing field, amplifying preferred voices, and ensuring that the "winning" vision is the one that serves the funder's strategic interests.
The model — funding legitimate organizations to steer their direction rather than creating artificial ones — is the same principle at work in the Congress for Cultural Freedom, and it anticipates the post-1983 role of the National Endowment for Democracy, which does openly and legally what ACUE did covertly.